A couple years ago I bought a Hauppauge 1600 to go into my Home Theater room .  It worked great with Vista, but like many IT Pros after many tweaks and configuration changes I decided to reinstall.  Well little did I know that I had lost my drivers CD and could never download the software for my TV tuner card.  It was a real bummer because although the monitor I bought could display 1080P it was not a TV, it was  a monitor and I needed my TV tuner card to work to be able to watch

Not sure how many people modify the size of the Windows Event Logs but it is something that I like to do simply because the default sizes of most them is just not enough.  For example you may remember the default for your System and Application log files was a measly 512kb.  That logged all of about a day of a really busy application server.  The problem with Server 2003 was the recommended maximum size for a log file was only around 300mb and the maximum total size for all Event Log

I’ve read a few articles this morning concerning Microsoft’s move to release a web version of its upcoming Office 2010 product.  This is a direct fire toward Google’s application suite and I think Microsoft is going to this help their dominance in this market.  Microsoft really isn’t going to lose any major businesses to this free online version.  Corporations are going to continue on with using the thick client because of the full rich suite of integrated components that Office has

I ran into a weird issue the other day when configuring permissions on a Share that was clustered.  I couldn’t find much online about this, and the one similar issue from Russ was not the issue here. Here is a little background info to help set the stage.  An admin changes the permission on the Shared Folder (not the File Share Cluster Resource) that is clustered from Read to Full Control.  This works when connecting to the node explicitly but not with the cluster name.  So he

Just saw over on the Server Core blog that Andrew posted some links to a couple excellent resources.  The first one is what I consider to be the Server Core Bible .  It has just about everything you can think of when it comes to configuring Server Core.  The next link is to a couple job aids that give you a quick look at some common commands.  These job aids actually gives me some ideas on some things I’d like to create…now if I only had more time. 

I admit it…I have issues with email.  So much so that I think I may have OCD.  I’m not trying to make fun of anyone that really has that disorder but I sure feel like I’m obsessed with unread email.  I can’t stand it in fact.  When a new mail arrives in my inbox I seem to stop what I'm doing and read it.  This is not helpful for someone that gets hundreds of emails a day.  Yes most are from monitors and alerts that technically I don’t need to read right away but

If you’ve got time on such short notice try to check out the webcast O’Reilly is hosting on What’s New in Active Directory for Server 2008 R2.  It is going to be hosted by two other Directory Services MVPs Brian Desmond and Laura Hunter . This is a free event and is scheduled for 90 mins. Date: Friday, April 24, 2009 Time: 10am San Francisco | 6pm  London | 1pm - New York | Sat, Apr 25th at 3am - Sydney | Sat, Apr 25th at 2am - Tokyo | Sat, Apr 25th at 1am - Beijing | 10:30pm – Mumbai Registration

Everyone has there own reason for loving or hating April Fools Day .  For the last 4 years it has been a day of great joy for me.  I got the email shortly from Microsoft that I was re-awarded my MVP for Directory Services!  I really think this blog has a lot to do with it and that means that i’m especially grateful to all 17 people (12 of which are probably family) that read it too!!!  Thanks to all of you for engaging me on through the comments and I hope that you will continue

Hopefully some of you have been playing with Server 2008 R2 while it has been in Beta . One of the features I’m looking forward to most is the AD Recycle Bin. Yes you heard me correct. We now have an easy method for restoring accidently deleted objects. In the past our only recovery method out of the box was to perform an authoritative restore of an object. That method had several issues that always rubbed me the wrong way. First you had to be in Directory Services Restore Mode (DRSM). And

I just found out that there is an Active Directory PowerShell Blog run by Microsoft’s AD PowerShell team.  I gathered that info from reading up on Jason’s post .  Its amazing how much info you can get from reading other people’s blogs…now on to the regularly scheduled post… After writing my article on the AD Recycle Bin I thought I would include a few PowerShell scripts here that can be used to modify the tombstone lifetime along with the deleted object lifetime.  Remember that the